Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

Paul Levy

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This Week’s Recommendations

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This Week’s Recommendations

  1. What’s Allowed in Married Sex? Ray Ortlund writes with such gentle wisdom. He begins, “The sexual chaos of our times does not free us. It pressures us. It confronts us with questions we didn’t raise or even want. It claims to offer us ever-expanding options. But the truth is, our hyper-sexual culture robs us of the joy of our personal discoveries within the safety and integrity of a Christian marriage.”

  2. Three Questions for Evangelism: Paul Levy’s questions are simple and empowering. What if we all tried just one of these in the next week?

  3. The God of Your Troubled Heart: Craig Thompson puts us into the shoes of John the Baptist. He says, “Maybe you have been like John. Maybe there have been times in your life when you questioned your relationship with or commitment to Jesus. Maybe you doubted that Jesus was who he claimed to be, or that he could possibly love you.”

  4. Monomania is Illiberal and Stupefying: Jonathan Haidt is concerned about monomania, “an exaggerated and unhealthy obsession with one thing.” Instead, Haidt believes, “we need critics to make us smarter, and that we should have no confidence in our beliefs until we have exposed them to intense challenge and have considered alternative views.”

  5. Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale: It’s incredible how intuitive music is.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       What the Bible Teaches About Sexuality: David Powlison on the threefold vision of sexuality in the Bible, " The Bible discusses many forms of sexual immorality and sexual victimization. A vision for fidelity does not drive honesty about infidelity and betrayal underground. Prudish? Not Scripture. Squeamish about the sordid details of human life? The biblical authors frequently (though not always) eschew photographic description and details when they speak of sex. They often model a certain delicacy of generic description."

2.       Making Space for your Neighbor: Dexter Culbreath encourages us to reach out to those God has placed near us, " Let’s be real. We are the ones holding ourselves back. We are not fans of failure, nor do we want to subject ourselves to the messiness of investing into the lives of others. So, what do we do? We wait to see how it goes with others before we stick our necks out there. As with many things, fear drives our hesitancy."

3.       Your Smartphone is Making You Stupid, Antisocial, and Unhealthy. So Why Can't You Put it Down? Ouch, this is a painful read by Eric Andrew-Gee. He reports that the evidence is "in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time. They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes."

4.       6 Ways to Discourage Your Pastor: Paul Levy with a pointed, but accurate list. His fourth reason is, "Speak to others in the congregation, but not the leadership. This way word gets back to leadership through others, 'Some people are saying...'"

5.       Mr. Graham and the Reasonable Man: How do we navigate these incredibly difficult discussions around law enforcement and African American men? The More Perfect podcast takes us back to the beginning of what would become an important precedent in courts' interpretation around how to rule on these cases.

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